I'm not going to save it will be easy. Cutting expenses is definitely not fun! But after you’ve done it successfully, it gets much easier. This is so that you can learn to budget your money during hard times. So not having any fun may just turn out to be worth the effort.

The most practical way to cut expenses is much like cutting calories when you’re on a diet. When cutting expenses, lay off the expensive stuff, and do things that have a low cost. The savings from cutting back on expenses may not seem much at first, but they’ll add up quicker than you may realize. And before you believe you can’t go another day without a pizza or ice cream, you’ll have reached your goal of getting back in control of your finances and stabilizing your credit situation.

You need to start by examining how much you’re currently spending. Then try to cut back to an amount you think you can handle (for example, if you currently spend $25 per week on lunch at work, you might try cutting back to $10 initially). After you’ve gone through all your expenses, if you still haven’t reduced your expenses enough in your first round of cutting, you can look at each expense again and try to reduce that amount even lower. For some expenses, you’ll reach an amount you can’t go below (for example, reducing your lunch at work below $5 per week may just not be realistic). So enter that amount in the Final Cut column.

I use a sheet with four columns to track my savings. The first column put down what the expense is such as kids allowances. The second column put down what you current spend down. In the third column, I put down what I can cut it down to. If I still need to cut it down, the following week I put down in the fourth column what I cut that down to. I add up all my columns from top to bottom. I can now see in the final cut week how much I am saving.